Charting a Creative Relationship

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the death of George MacKay Brown. ALISTAIR PEEBLES discusses the poet’s life and work with composer Peter Maxwell Davies
 

SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES, one of the most important and influential composers of our time, arrived in Orkney on holiday in the summer of 1970, and met a number of people, including George Mackay Brown, who were soon to become firm friends. Within a few years Max had moved to Orkney permanently, living first in Hoy and now in Sanday.

A new biography, George Mackay Brown: The Life, by Maggie Fergusson (John Murray, 2006) gives a fascinating account of the first meeting between George and Max. As well as leading eventually to the founding of the St Magnus Festival in 1977, their friendship had a profound effect on the composer himself, and now more than thirty of the works in Max’s catalogue (see www.maxopus.com ) are based on texts by the poet.

But what was it that made Max consider coming to live in Orkney, and make this place his home? As he describes in the following interview, which took place in March, there were several reasons – to do with his music, and the place itself, but not least because of the people he met, George Mackay Brown in particular.

I think I did come here looking for something which Orkney had to offer, but I didn’t know it, and it was meeting George and other people and experiencing the sea and the landscape that brought this home to me

AP: How important to your work both present and past was your relationship with George Mackay Brown?

Max: That working relationship with George has been absolutely essential to any creation I’ve been doing since I first came to Orkney in 1970. One of the very first things I did on that holiday was to discover, in the Stromness Book Shop, An Orkney Tapestry. I read it overnight and the very next day I met George, quite by chance. He happened to be on holiday on Hoy and on my way over to visit the island I met a publisher of his. I was invited to lunch and met George and – it gelled.

It was George who suggested I live in the house, Bunnertoon, in Rackwick – that I should actually live and work there – which of course I did, three or four years later. But it was George’s work as a writer, one who was very conscious of the agricultural and fishing year, and as a Catholic related that to his whole religious ethos in such a way that his whole creation, his whole life perhaps, was ritualized in a very strong way – that’s what got through to me.

I lived in Rackwick for 28 years and I think all that time the spirit of George – even when he was alive – was in a way hovering over me. The way in which he could make very plain English language work very hard for its living and mean a lot more than it said on the surface, and as I said the way in which he could bring the year of fishing and agriculture into relationship with his religion – this went very deep and was an example to me, and still is.

AP: I am very struck by what you said there about his influence having remained central to you and your work through all the time since you first met.

Max: Oh yes. I think the example of George – of course, his religion is something I would not question, though it’s not for me – but there was something there, a solidity, something which was tremendously courageous in face of all adversity. He had been ill with tuberculosis and he faced life, with that great strong jaw and nose, with a sense of huge resolution. The frailty which we all knew was central to his life, from long ill-health, was something he was somehow able to put to one side. He wrote regularly every day and he worked and worked and produced marvellous, marvellous words.

AP: In addition to all that of course, as you’ll know very well, he was a very humorous man.

Max: Yes, I enjoyed his humour tremendously and at the Bevan’s house in Stromness very often we would spend a whole evening just laughing and joking over glasses of beer and whisky and wine and that was always very, very enjoyable. His sense of humour was indefatigable, and this is something which again provides a wonderful example.

I hope I’ve got a sense of humour but it was George who very often reminded me, “Hey come on you’ve go to be different about this (what ever it was that was depressing me) and put a better face on it and then if you think you are smiling you probably will.”
 
AP: George’s route towards publication was a lot less direct than your own, and by temperament you seem to be quite different. Do you feel that the differences between you were effective in bringing you together creatively?

Max: I do think that George and I were very, very different. For a start he was very introverted in a way that I’m not. I’m not necessarily happy about it, but I will stand up in front of an orchestra of 100 people and tell them what to do. I don’t think George would ever have done that and I don’t think George was even very happy to recite his poems in public. He recited them for a recording machine under pressure, and thank goodness he did, but unlike me I think he was very reticent about actually discussing his work and talking about how he created. He much preferred to talk about the quality of the whisky and the wine!

AP: Perhaps in a performance based art such as your own the impulse to communicate directly with an audience is far stronger than with writers.

Max: I don’t know whether the desire to communicate is stronger or not, but in music that is the way its done, or has been done hitherto, although nowadays a lot of composers create music entirely out of an electronic machine, and don’t have access to or a need for orchestras, choruses, singers or whatever. It’s like painting a picture and that’s it – you manipulate your electronic machine and you have a work of art which is fixed and can not be performed otherwise because it is not notated in any other way.

But the way that a musician works normally when he creates means that he has to communicate through other people, through choruses, orchestras and so on. This is something a poet doesn’t have to do. The reader comes into direct contact with the poet’s imagination through the words on the page. Of course, musicians can do that if they can read a score, but how many people can really read a full score of an orchestral piece? Not that many – they do need the intermediary of a conductor and an orchestra, and of course as a composer that influences one’s way of approaching the material with which one works, and also with one’s way of getting to the people who are eventually, one hopes, going to enjoy that work.

AP: Is there any period of George’s work that you find most interesting?

Max: I think that particularly since the complete book of poems has come out, no, I find them all absolutely fascinating. Of course the first ones I met were the poems in An Orkney Tapestry, which is really a poetic travelogue, and then in Fishermen with Ploughs. But I’ve set quite a lot of other poems of his through the years and I’ve used quite a lot of his prose works as a basis for both children’s music theatre pieces and even a big opera, The Martyrdom of St Magnus, which started off the festival. That was the opening gambit if you like for the very first St Magnus Festival.

AP: Perhaps… I was reading over the history of the Festival the other day and there were a few gambits that took place prior to that, in a political sense.

Max: Oh yes, well I don’t mince my words when I disagree with somebody and the attitude towards the Festival by the then Council was not very constructive, and I let them know it Then of course eventually the festival happened, and eventually the Council came on board, as did a lot of people. When something is successful they come along, but it was 10 years before the Council gave a reception after a concert and that was when the Royal Philharmonic came with Isaac Stern and Andre Previn. I was very pleased that they did come on board and they have been on board, very handsomely and very constructively, ever since, but I still remember those early years with a wry smile.

AP: Well yes, you’re clearly not someone who shies away from a challenge. One sees the pictures of you in the early seventies in Bunnertoon – a roofless, doorless, windowless eyrie up there on the hill – and yet you knew instantly that was where you were going to base yourself.

Max: I knew instantly, but that faith I suppose has kept me going all through my life. How it eventually is going to happen is another matter, and I think in all these instances – the construction of the house in Hoy out of the ruin, of course, but also such things as getting to college and doing music at all, working with orchestras, working with the Fires of London – all of this has all relied on the goodwill and generosity of friends, and I realise what a huge debt I have to people here in Orkney. People like the Bevans and Dr Johnstone in Stromness, Jack Rendall and others in Hoy and now the whole community in Sanday where I’m just welcomed and allowed to be. It is a wonderful thing.

AP: Can I quote you something you say in the new biography of George? It’s in reference to your first meeting with him in Rackwick, from which so much followed. You say, “From then on everything happened as if pre-ordained.” But it can’t have been simple coincidence – you must have come here looking for something that Orkney had to offer.

Max: I think I did come here looking for something which Orkney had to offer, but I didn’t know it, and it was meeting George and other people and experiencing the sea and the landscape that brought this home to me. I was living before that in London and at the same time in Dorset and as I have often said, I think I was burning the candle at least three ends. I did need, not to slow down, but to sort my thoughts out.

I think coming here – although as I insist I wasn’t looking for a specific place – was part of (and here I think I’m not being presumptuous) a very big homecoming to somewhere I could sort my compositional problems out. I realised that if I went on writing the kind of pieces I was writing at the time, that vocabulary would soon become exhausted and I had to find other things to help me through the work I wished to do. And that I very quickly did once I’d settled in Rackwick.
 
AP: As well as the other friends you made here – and as we’ll go on to discuss, the influence the natural environment and the peace and quiet of the place – centrally as you’ve said, what made the difference was George. In another context I’ve heard you refer to George as a kind of father-figure.

Max: I think father-figure is right. I know he wasn’t that much older then me, but he seemed to be so much wiser, so much calmer, so much more sensible. In those early days here in Orkney I think common sense was the last thing I had. Perhaps at that age you shouldn’t have it all that much! I was writing music which I think upset an awful lot of people, and it is right for a young person to do that.

But I look back at those pieces now and wonder what all the fuss was about. It is lovely that you may go to conduct an orchestra anywhere in the world performing one of those early pieces, and they play it without any fuss. My goodness, I remember the fuss that orchestras made then. But these things do change. You yourself change, and I think that I do nowadays enjoy this very unfashionable thing called maturity. And I think if I am mature – and I hope that I am – it’s very largely through settling in Rackwick and later in Sanday, and I think George had quite a part to play because he was very mature when I first met him, far more than me.

AP: Would you describe George as a musical person?

Max: I think George must have been very musical deep in his soul. You read his words and they are very, very musical. I don’t think that he was all that interested in music, and I think that he probably didn’t come into contact with music all that much when he was young. He enjoyed a lot of classical music but it wasn’t one of his great loves. However he was quite happy to see me, and other people, set some of his poetry and prose and produce operas and music theatre pieces based on his ideas.

AP: Were there any settings that you made of his work that pleased him in particular?

Max: I remember him saying he was pleased with things but, I never knew how polite he was being. He was a very polite man and even with good friends you can be a little bit too polite. I think that he was genuinely puzzled by some of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them. I remember From Stone to Thorn which I wrote in the very early 70s for my own group as a commission for Oxford University. I think when he eventually heard that he was a little bit puzzled but he said that he did enjoy it. He was always polite.

AP: That was based on the poem Stations of the Cross.

Max: Yes, from An Orkney Tapestry. I used that version although he did revise it later of course.

AP: Did you every feel anxious about how he would respond to anything you had done?

Max: I always felt anxious about how he would respond. After all I did say that he was a kind of father-figure and you are always a little bit concerned. Yes it’s a question of someone you respect and admire tremendously you just hope that they are going to enjoy what you do.

AP: Is the way you go about setting one of the poems or a sequence of them primarily a verbal or primarily a musical engagement with the text?

Max: It is very hard to say exactly how you set a text. It nags you first. It has something which is getting through to you, and I think interestingly enough although it must be a text which sparks off music, if it is too complete in itself – and I don’t mean that in an insulting way – you can’t begin with it. With Shakespeare, for instance, I find that most of it, except for the songs, is too complete in itself, and I wouldn’t dream of setting one of those sonnets. But George’s work is so pregnant with hidden meaning, created through very simple words, and it has such a marvellous rhythm of its own that it stimulates music. It doesn’t seem to be enclosed already in its own music, and I would find that my imagination would be stimulated.

I would be thinking about the words as I walked, around Hoy usually, and they would create what I think of not so much as musical structures but possibilities of musical structures, so that I would think, well, with this verse I can just
imagine that kind of structure between that kind of opening gambit of that key moving through that, to that… and it would gradually fill in.

Very occasionally it works just the other way and you are not working from a design inwards to detail, the detail is there first. You might just have a line of music to a line of poetry and then you have to fill that out by expanding from that small cell and putting the other cells on to it till you eventually have a complete piece. I think strophic poems tend to be the latter and those where the length of line is freer or more elaborate and the lines don’t rhyme, that tends to be the first way.

AP: A lot of George’s imagery, or the style of his imagery, derives from Norse kennings, highly compressed metaphors, and around those there tends to be quite a lot of space for the imagination to fill in. Is that something that you feel inspired by or that creates a sense of opportunity for you?

Max: Yes, I think George leaves enough room for your imagination to run wild if you like! He has a marvellous way of stimulating you to fill in what isn’t there and I think sometimes the greatest music, the greatest poetry, the greatest paintings do just that. In music you can make a parallel image between having a very high note and a very low note – this is a very simple image – and they are not just a high and a low note, but if the relationship between those notes has been set up properly, your imagination fills in a harmonic space between, which it can inhabit, which if you like it can run around in, and I think a lot of very good poetry does just that.

AP: The first thing that came to my mind there in relation to what you say about filling in the spaces in George’s poetry was the idea of you striding across the hills above Rackwick, and out by the old Man of Hoy, and so on, thinking about the poetry and in a sense what was filling in the poetry was your immediate, direct response to the natural world and the sounds of the sea, the birds and the land.

Max: That is absolutely correct, walking about on Hoy those natural sounds did, somehow, become involved with George’s lines and the music does reflect those natural sound images. But more than that I think having all that room to yourself, you could pace that place and actually pace what you were writing in the music with no one coming and spoiling it by meeting you – if you were careful where you went. You could pace it out and say to yourself, well I’m going to pace this bit and this is this progression and then you could go back and think well I’m going to change that and see how that sounds and pace it again. As I’ve often said it was like walking inside a musical structure, an architectural structure, in this case together with George’s words. It is a process I still use.

AP: Can you still associate particular settings with particular walks or pacings out?

Max: I think I did the same walk so often up on the hills there, and with all that space available you know it is very unlikely you are going to see anybody and if you do you can avoid them easily enough. But it’s a generic thing, walking high on those hills in Hoy often in really rotten weather too – it’s all part of it, part of a compositional process that has all blended together.

AP: And you say you continue to do that on Sanday.

Max:Yes

AP: More level of course.

Max: Yes, of course. Being over 70 now it is a good idea to have flat beaches and flat landscapes. I’m still all right, but there will come a point when I wouldn’t like to wander around on hills in bad weather. But yes, exactly the same process, exactly the same. The first walks I did on Sanday I associate with the first orchestral piece I wrote when I was there – a big orchestral piece, which in fact, ironically, concerned my student days in Rome. It was called Roma Amor. But it was projected onto the Sanday sea and landscape.
 
AP: You said in a recent lecture that you can’t help but feel “just a little responsible for the huge lack of awareness of classical music in the wider public”. What did you mean by that?

Max: I have been very aware in recent years, with educational cuts in music and the lack of singing teaching in schools and the lack of instrumental tuition, that there is a whole generation of children which hasn’t come into contact with music as they did for instance in the 60s when I was teaching in a school in Gloucestershire. There we had a school orchestra and a junior orchestra, a big chorus and one or two smaller choirs, and jazz groups and pop groups and goodness knows not what.

It was very, very alive and I feel that over the years perhaps I should have screamed out more against these changes. I was too preoccupied with being a composer and running around conducting orchestras. I did make noises but probably not enough, and I feel bad about that. I make noises now and I feel I am in a position to do that but whether anybody will take much notice I don’t know. There is I think a better attitude towards music education on the part of the present Government, but how much they are going to do about it remains to be seen.

AP: Finally, to return to Orkney, how would you say it has changed since you first arrived here all those years ago?

Max: Orkney has changed. In essence it is the same but the changes have to do with the number of houses, the size of ships, the increase in signposts – which is amazing – and the availability of delicatessen in Kirkwall. This is a recent innovation, which I must say I welcome with very open arms indeed.

I think that the quality of life in Orkney in some ways, with the establishment of so many festivals, has gone up, and I still find you can have wonderful conversations with people here – which is better than South!

© Alistair Peebles, 2006.

Links

• Peter Maxwell Davies
• George MacKay Brown
• St Magnus Festival